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Friday, 21 March 2014

Insurance Rates at Dyman and Associates: Those with retirement plans increasingly confident

The ratio of workers
who are confident they'll be able to retire comfortably rebounded this year to
the highest level in seven years, according to an Employee Benefit Research
Institute survey.

The 24th annual
retirement confidence survey found that 55% of workers described themselves as
either being "very confident" or "somewhat confident" of
their ability to live comfortably during their retirement years. That compares
with a combined 51% in 2013. Eighteen percent described themselves as
"very confident," compared with a record low of 13% last year. Insurance
Tips at Dyman and Associates

Retirement experts
attributed the shift largely to greater confidence among workers with retirement
investments, who benefited from a resurgent stock market in 2012 and 2013.
The attitudes of those without a tie to the stock market were largely unchanged
while those with significant levels of debt continued to struggle.

"Without a doubt,
we enjoyed two years of very positive market performance in 2012 and 2013, and
those who had savings and 401(k) balances enjoyed the benefit of those market
returns," said Greg Burrows, a senior vice president for retirement and
investor services at Dyman
Associates Insurance Group.

The Employee Benefit
Research Institute survey is the oldest of its kind and was based on January
phone interviews with 1,000 workers and 501 retirees. It has a margin of error
of at least ±3.5 percentage points.

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Consumer confidence
still has not recovered to pre-recession levels. In 2007, 70% of those surveyed
were confident of their ability to retire.

The percentage of
respondents who described themselves as "not at all" confident
receded to 24% this year from a record 28% in 2013. That gauge of anxious
workers has worsened fairly steadily since the first year of the survey in
1993, when only 6% of respondents described themselves as "not at
all" confident.

"Worker savings
remain low, and only a minority appears to be taking basic steps to prepare for
retirement," survey co-authors Nevin Adams and Jack VanDerhei wrote on
behalf of the institute. "Increased confidence is observed almost
exclusively among those with higher household income, but confidence was also
found to be strongly correlated with household participation in a retirement
plan."

Forty-six percent of
the workers surveyed who did not have a retirement plan described themselves as
"not at all" confident, compared with only 11% of those with a plan.
About 24% of those with a pension, 401(k) or IRA plan described themselves as
"very confident," compared with 9% of those without a plan.

The weak labor market
has affected wages and benefits since the Great Recession, which began in December
2007 and ended in June 2009. The employment-to-population ratio, a measure of
the percentage of Americans with jobs, was 58.8% in February. That compares
with 63.3% for February 2007. The 4.5-percentage-point difference is equal to
more than 14 million people.

Stagnant wages and
lost jobs have left many Americans in basic survival mode. Some also are
laboring to pay off sizable levels of student loan debt, which totaled more
than $1.08 trillion at the end of 2013, according to the Federal Reserve. About
11.5% of student loan debt was at least 90 days overdue.

"More than half
the workers in the survey indicated that managing daily expenses and the cost
of living are the primary reasons they are not saving for retirement,"
Burrows said, noting that those who fail to save for retirement in good times
are left with even fewer choices in hard times.

Workers who begin
saving $3,000 a year at age 25 wind up with five times more retirement savings
than those who begin at 45, according to Principal Financial Group. The Des
Moines-based insurance and investment management firm had more than $483
billion of assets under management as of Dec. 31

"Fifty-eight
percent of workers and 44% of retirees say they are having a problem with their
level of debt," said Matt Greenwald of Greenwald & Associates, which
conducted the study with the institute.